Haleon plc

Good morning. Welcome to today's Hellion's first quarter trading update. My name is Sarah and I'll be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. I'd like to pass the conference over to our host, Joe Russell, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Halion's Commons call for our first quarter trading statement. I am Jo Russell, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined this morning by Brian McNamara, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dawn Allen, our Chief Financial Officer. Just to remind listeners on the call that in the discussion today, the company may make certain forward-looking statements, including those that refer to our estimates, plans and expectations. Please refer to this morning's announcement and the company's UK and SEC filings for more details, including factors that could lead actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by any such forward-looking statements. Today we'll focus on organic revenue performance. There's a full reconciliation of organic revenue in the appendix of the company's slide presentation. Following Brian and Dawn's remarks, we will take your questions. And for those listening to our webcast who would like to ask a question, you can find the details and page through today's press release. And with that, I'll hand over to Brian.

Thanks, Jo, and welcome to our Q1 2026 results call. We've navigated a challenging market in the first quarter where consumer confidence continued to weaken and delivered 2.2% organic revenue growth. The continued weakness in cold and flu that we highlighted at full year impacted group organic growth by 130 basis points. Once again, oral health performed strongly with innovation-led premiumization and geographic expansion driving continued success in Sensodyne and Parodontax. And in VMS, Centrum saw an improved performance underpinned by innovation. We continue to make progress against our strategic priorities. Our productivity initiatives continue to drive strong gross margin improvement, consistent with our strategy to build more competitive, consumer-focused supply chains. In March, we announced 65 million pound investment in a new oral health facility in Shanghai. That's due to open in early 2028. And on culture, we are moving forward on the operating model changes we set out in January, which are designed to drive growth and agility. Coming back to growth, Dawn will take you through the numbers, but first I'd like to look at North America, which is a good example of how our growth initiatives are progressing well. Over the past quarters, we've been very deliberate in strengthening both our marketing effectiveness and our in-market execution. And while we have reorganized the team, to follow our category-led approach. We have also created a cross-category platform team to capture opportunities that sit across the portfolio. A good example of this is GLP-1. We are taking a holistic view of consumer needs. This is not a single category opportunity. It spans VMS, digestive health, pain relief, and oral health. And we are aligning our brands to play across that full consumer journey. In parallel, we are accelerating innovation and sharpening how we segment our brands to address consumer needs. The recent launch of Centrum AgeDeFi is a good example, allowing us to reach a younger consumer with a more tailored proposition, alongside innovations such as Excedrin Rapid Relief, bringing faster-acting solutions to the market in a category where speed of relief matters. Taken together, these actions are starting to translate into performance. In Q1, North America returned to growth up 1% overall. Next, let's look at our emerging markets, where we delivered organic revenue growth of 4.3%. That was largely due to weak cold and flu season in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific. Latin America, and particularly Brazil, also continue to be impacted by challenging consumer backdrop and performance challenges with higher promotional activity. We've put in place a number of programs to support growth in Latin America, which we expect to positively impact performance from Q2 onwards. Examples include the launch of accessibility offerings across Sensodyne and DentureCare, along with activations we are planning around the FIFA World Cup for Eno. Despite the near-term headwinds, we remain confident in our emerging markets. We have strong brands. Our innovation pipeline, along with the actions we're taking to strengthen distribution, will allow us to reach more consumers. Turning now to the outlook. As we talked in February, Outside of respiratory, we are not assuming a material improvement in global category growth. Despite the macroeconomic and consumer backdrop becoming more uncertain in recent weeks, we are maintaining our outlook for the year, but much will depend on the duration of the current conflict and any potential impact on the wider economies of our key markets. So we expect organic revenue growth to be between 3% and 5% for the full year. We will deliver improving growth momentum through the improved performance in North America that I've talked about, increased investment in our e-com channel in China, particularly Douyin, and an improvement in Latin America from some of the actions I outlined earlier. On profitability, our plans are on track and we remain confident in strong gross margin expansion. That improvement will support by ongoing productivity initiatives, delivering high single-digit operating growth while allowing for continued healthy investment in the business. I'll now hand over to Dawn to take you through the numbers in more detail.